I'm an Engineering Manager at Cloudflare, and we hire juniors. But... this was not a thing we always did. For a long while the company was much smaller and we

I'm an Engineering Manager at Cloudflare, and we hire juniors. But... this was not a thing we always did. For a long while the company was much smaller and we had a limited number of roles open and so we focused on fewer hands that could get more done as each team might only be a couple of people (for example the engineers behind Cloudflare DNS could be counted on a single hand) meaning we hired mostly senior whilst a few juniors were hired where the skills matched well. As we've grown we've reached the place that to offer progression and growth to our senior engineers into engineering leadership or management means that we acknowledge that you may be a great engineer today but you now need to learn and master communication skills. We are hiring juniors to give our senior engineers growth opportunities as we need engineers who can be mentored, taught, shown how things work, who will ask questions that challenge the seniors to explain why they've done something the way they have and what considerations were applied. What I love about where we are now is that this encourages us to hire the most curious, smart, and kind individuals who will benefit the most from that communication. We are now well-placed to grant potentially career shaping and life changing opportunities and to give juniors access to some of the great senior engineers we've been attracting. It's a total win-win. And having seen this play out, and reflecting on the smaller places I've worked which lacked juniors, and the larger places that had a healthy balance of juniors, and being at Cloudflare long enough to have witnessed this change... I'd say that if you are a junior engineer, consider applying to growing mid-size organisations (250-2,500 employees) as those are the ones that are likely to be under similar needs to fill gaps in a way that helps support the growth and development of their existing engineers as well as their new ones.